As usual, today while I was writing a journal, I hit a wall where I could not recall a specific word; it was extremely frustrating. What is the best way for me to improve or expand my vocabulary in general? If you know of a solution, please share it with me.*

Hi, guccigangg7878. While there was nothing major wrong grammatically with your post, as a native speaker, it reads somewhat awkwardly to my native ears. As a result, whatever changes I made were to allow your sentences to sound more natural, to eliminate redundancy, and for ease of reading. I hope that this helps you. J.

*A vocabulary is a group of words known or used by a person, or used within a particular field (e.g., medical, legal, military, etc.), and while you may have in fact needed to remember an entire vocabulary, when writing, it is most often a single word or phrase that we are looking for, and thus my change.

The use of the semicolon is okay, since the individual clauses are related, but the first word after it should be lower-case instead of capitalized. In my opinion, when you “know” something, yet, cannot remember the name of it, that situation is more frustrating than baffling. Baffling means incomprehensible or confusing as in “I find any math beyond basic Algebra baffling.”

We use the idiom “pop the cork” mainly in terms of celebration, as it is relates to opening a bottle of champagne or wine. It also means to “losing one’s temper” (as in exploding), as well as a few sexual terms (which I will not go into here…). Regardless, I think it a stretch to use it in the sense of “sharing,” but I can somewhat understand how you might think of using it in that way.

As to the best way to improve your vocabulary so that you can easily recall it, besides reading at great volume, I would also suggest occasionally looking through a good thesaurus. Then, you should be able to remember at least a couple of a word’s synonyms that should trigger your memory in turn, to the exact word that you had wanted. Very similar as to how you will now always remember that the word baffling means incomprehensible or confusing, and vice-versa.